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Michael Nielsen

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I’m a writer, scientist, and programmer.

Current projects

I’m currently learning to program, motivated by the possibility of creating tools to improve the way we think. A recent mini-project is described in my post on Lisp as the Maxwell’s equations of software (code repository). You can see some other projects at my blog on data-driven intelligence, at GitHub, and in my series on the Google Technology Stack.

Recent book

My most recent book is a manifesto for open science entitled Reinventing Discovery. In the book I argue that we can build networked tools to dramatically speed up the rate of scientific discovery, not just in one field, but across all of science. But these tools will only reach their potential if networked science is also open science. And so the book argues that publicly funded science should be open science. You can get more of the flavour of the book from my talk at ted.com, or in my op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

Reinventing Discovery was named one of the best books of 2011 by the Financial Times and by the Boston Globe. (Reviews: Guardian, Financial Times, Nature, Tim O’Reilly’s review on Google+)

More of my writing can be found here.

Scientific work

My interest in open science grew out of my work as a scientist. In the 1990s and 2000s I helped pioneer the field of quantum computation. Together with Ike Chuang of MIT, I wrote the standard text on quantum computing. This is one of the ten most highly cited physics books of all time (Source: Google Scholar, March 2012). I’ve written more than fifty scientific papers, including invited contributions to Scientific American and Nature. My research contributions include the majorization theorem governing the manipulation of entangled quantum states, involvement in one of the first quantum teleportation experiments, named as one of Science Magazine’s Top Ten Breakthroughs of the Year for 1998, quantum gate teleportation, quantum process tomography, and critical contributions to the formula for the quantum channel capacity (1, 2, 3). A full list of papers is here.

Education and Employment

I was educated at the University of Queensland, and as a Fulbright Scholar in the group of Carl Caves at the University of New Mexico. I worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, at Caltech as the Richard Chace Tolman Prize Fellow, at the University of Queensland as Foundation Professor of Quantum Information Science and a Federation Fellow, and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics as a Senior Faculty member. In 2008, I gave up my tenured academic position in order to write my book Reinventing Discovery.

Contact

Email: mn@michaelnielsen.org

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